Ashwin Suresh on building a legendary brand
In this interview, I spoke with Ashwin Suresh, a fellow UIUC alum and a cofounder of Loco, an e-sports and live-streaming platform for India. He has a proven track record of building successful brands over his career, including Filter Copy, Pocket Aces, Dice Media, Gobble, and more. As the conversation below will reveal, Ashwin has a knack for understanding his users, building authentic relationships with them, and crafting a brand from scratch.
In our chat we covered—
Loco’s origins
Loco’s organic journey from an HQ Trivia style game to a streaming platform
Creating a brand that users love
How to “hack brand” and win your category
What is Loco?
Loco is India's leading esports and live streaming platform, as well as the world's largest independent live streaming platform.
What led you to this idea?
The origin came from the fact that there was no dedicated, Indian-built gaming platform for India. YouTube is the de facto standard for any type of content, whether it's live-streamed or not. That's because YouTube is preinstalled on every phone in India. It’s an Android market.
Game streaming has unique requirements and needs a separate set of product features. Plus it has a vocal, loud and passionate community. We felt that creating a town square for the gaming ecosystem would be absolutely necessary, and could create a lot of value. We also felt that it had to be video-first because these are people who consume games, who play games, and who also consume the content of other people playing games.
How do you approach brand building? How do you decide how much time and money to spend on the brand?
To answer that I have to go back to my first startup, Pocket Aces, because that’s when we developed the ability to build consumer brands in India. Pocket Aces was started back in 2013. By 2015 we launched our first digital brand called Dice Media. Today, Dice Media is a large creator of web shows and series. If you watch shows on Netflix, you probably have come across Little Things. That's a show we produced. We have a number of shows on Amazon and Hotstar as well.
That's a content brand that's really gone beyond social and has grown to the OTT world. After that, we launched Filter Copy, which became very quickly the largest consumer general content brand in India.
In fact, at one point, we were ranked #1 by views on Instagram in India. A lot of people in schools and colleges started to follow the brand. Today the audience for that is tens of millions. We touch 50 million people a week with the content on that platform, and it's an extremely well-known brand. If you go to any public place and talk to people about Filter Copy, they know who you are, and they recognize a lot of the talent. We've used that brand, in fact, to build a lot of individual talent out. Loco was built in a similar fashion, using a lot of the learnings we have from that journey.
If I had to distill that down to a few things:
[Distribution First]
First, we are very distribution focused. We think from a distribution hat before thinking from a content hat. If you know how you’re getting to your consumer, then you can back-calculate what kind of content will enable that delivery. If you know that your consumer is sitting behind a Facebook page or behind a YouTube channel, then you need to figure out what makes those algorithms work. Why does content proliferate on those platforms? How are you going to oil that machine to get it in front of your customers? That's something that we've done consistently.
[Use data just for direction]
Second, we've learned to respect the data, but not be blinded by it. Most people here don't use data at all. In the West, most people are blinded by data. I think we found a nice middle ground where we look at the data, and it really influences a lot of our direction, but it doesn't drive the decision-making. While we consider it, we still take risks. Sometimes we take bets that go against conventional data. More often than not, those things turn out to be good decisions.
[Can’t compromise on cadence]
The third thing to build a brand is having a very regular cadence. I think people trip up on the most basic of these things.
We've always understood that we need to be in front of a consumer consistently at similar points during the day, during the week, during the month, etc. We see that with Dice, which is creating long-form shows. Dice can't create a show every week, so that channel doesn't grow necessarily as fast as something like a Filter Copy, which is putting out memes every hour, literally in front of consumers every hour. And so we clearly know cadence matters.
[Make it unique]
The fourth and last thing is that you can't be everything to everyone. I think you have to realize there are multiple consumer segments and different people can like you for different reasons. Social media algorithms are pretty smart at figuring out why somebody likes you and serving them more of the things they like.
Think about what the brand's personality is and what you're trying to push out there. You could have the most boring product or a dry product. But that doesn't mean the brand can’t be exciting.
[On the Loco name]
I came up with the name Loco because I felt like I wanted a brand that could transcend urban boundaries. In India, the word ‘loco’ is not understood. People don't know the Spanish meaning of the word and most people think it's just a sound.
It’s just a word… in fact, just a sound. It has no meaning. That's really helpful because that makes it easy for people across the country, across regional divides to say the word. Anyone can say these two syllables very easily. You can't really get it wrong.
The second thing is we created the mascot, which is the little hippo. Very deliberately. We wanted something that was cute, fun, and easy to identify. You could do a tiger and those other kinds of animals, but they're all over the place. We wanted something that could stand out.
What customer segment did you decide to focus on first?
For Loco specifically, the journey was pretty organic. We actually thought about creating a live Trivia game show, much like what HQ Trivia was doing in the US. We wanted to build a distribution platform that we could own and would allow us to communicate directly with our customers. We felt that interactive live video was an area that was exciting, but we didn't originally think of it as a game streaming platform.
We launched just after HQ Trivia. A few months after that, we were actually growing faster than they were. We were the fastest growing Trivia platform in the world at the time. It became a real phenomenon. Offices would shut down between 1:00 to 1:20 pm everyday.
People would just sit in the cafeteria, just playing the game together. People would send us pictures, and some folks even had the hippo tattooed on their arms. The entire office would dress up in the Loco color and stand outside to take pictures. The fandom had gotten out of control. Very quickly, there were a bunch of similar businesses that started off, and I think somewhere along that journey we realized that business in and of itself wasn't sustainable.
As we started to pivot, our brand messaging also changed. When we moved to game streaming, we realized game streaming attracted a much younger demographic and had to look and feel different.
[The rise of a new customer segment]
If you look at 2018, when we launched it, Jio was not fully penetrated. It just started to get penetrated. Xiaomi smartphones weren't available yet. I mean, they were just starting to grow themselves. So what happened in 2018 and 2019? Two very important things—
Smartphone penetrations went through the roof. Internet access got really stable. On the back of that, you had the entrance of new mobile games. What’s more, games like PUBG were free. You had all these games coming, and people started playing them regularly. Suddenly a random person in the middle of a small town with very low connectivity could suddenly download a two GB game on their phone and start playing it. It was just unheard of, just a year before that.
When that happened, the entire gaming revolution came about in India. For us as a brand, we had to change our messaging completely. We went from being, for example, more English-heavy to Hindi-heavy because were talking to a more regional audience. We started to see pockets of interest growing outside of the large cities.
For example in the South, over the last year and a half, we've seen a huge presence of Malayali Streamers and Malali viewers. This means we must have content in that language, in that format that adheres to that culture, and with the sensibility to make the right jokes.
[On brand market fit]
You can think about product market fit, but for a brand. It’s a constantly evolving thing. The audience evolves and you have to evolve the brand to match that. It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, but there are enough leading indicators to see the shift. You see it through the comments. You see it in how customers speak to you.
How do you measure brand?
I don't think we've ever tried to measure it just speaking about our own brand. I think we've relied on empirical data, and anecdotal data, to give us a sense of how the brand is perceived.
Do I think it can be measured? Certainly, there are traditional ways to do it. You can do, like, brand NPS scores and get agencies to come and do these brand recall studies, but I feel like a lot of that is so specific that it doesn't give you any actionable, insight.
I think the larger thing is to see the nature of your interactions with your consumers. That tells you what they think about you as a brand. If your customers are engaging with you, if you're a service brand, you're like a travel company or e-commerce company, a lot of times your customer only engages with you when they have to complain about something.
[On interacting with customers]
So with most companies, direct user interactions are mostly negative. It's like, “hey, my flight was delayed”, or “you should give me a refund”, or “my product was not shipped on time”, etc.
If you're a consumer brand that is focused on entertainment, like Loco, your interactions are more well-rounded. Sure, you do get people that are complaining about service, but you also get people that are there just generally just chatting with you.
We get messages every day saying, “hi Admin, what are you having for lunch today?” They're just chatting with the administrator! They are like ‘I’m lonely, I'm just going to chat with somebody. Why don't I chat with the brand Loco?’ It’s bizarre.
This happened even back in Filter Copy. Back then we would actually reply with, “Hey, I'm having xyz for lunch today. What about you?”. We’d have those conversations and people really loved them. They were innocent, very sincere messages.
I think the nature of your interactions with your customers will give you the best read on how your brand is doing. For the longest time, it was just my co-founders and I replying to these messages because it's the only way you really understand what people want, and what they think of the brand.
Everyone is human. Like, when I hang out with you, I'm reading the look on your face. I'm looking at a reaction to the things I'm saying to gauge what you think of me. It's the same thing with your customers as a brand. It’s common sense.
Is there such a thing as ‘Brand Hacking’? Are there things you can do to grow brand quickly, or is it mostly an organic, long-term effort?
I think you absolutely can. You can have brand hacks and I think there are a few ways to in India, especially. I've seen brands that are irreverent, regularly break through the clutter.
Most brands here play it a bit safer. They stay within the guardrails and they follow the traditional brand-building techniques.
But then you have brands like Cred, which did a very audacious marketing campaign around both social media as well as television, and then they stood out as a brand. It wasn't the product that was standing out, since the product was not mass market. I don't think the brand and products have to be tied at the hip. I think they could be slightly disassociated or at arm’s length.
[Breaking the clutter]
We did a very interesting brand marketing campaign recently for a tournament. We worked with a very popular streamer to make an ad… but the ad was just him going about his day. He would wake up, look at the camera and say, “download Loco now”. He would go brush his teeth and look at the camera and say, “download Loco now”. He would have a coffee and look at the camera and say, “download Loco now”. He said it like eight times and that was it. That was our ad.
After that, we saw a lot of love because people thought it was funny and eventually it became a hashtag. We broke through the clutter.
#DownloadLocoNow. And we didn't even seed the hashtag. You can hack a brand by just doing stuff that's just off-kilter, which engages people. It doesn't matter what you say, so much as they’re finding it funny, they're engaging with it, they're interacting. That’s a good hack. The hardest way to build a brand is to stay within the guardrails.